BEN SURVEYED HIS HOME, SUCH as it was, better from the inside than the out, where the aluminum siding was coming loose, a corner piece clacking in the faintest breeze. From the outside, it was the kind of place that in a hurricane broke open like an egg, a rotten, festering egg. Inside, however, it might be cozy, when the heater was working, or it might be cool, if all the windows opened and were not, instead, permanently sealed with marine sealant. It might be homey with Jake’s toys, his clothes neatly piled on the chair. It might even be Shevaunne who’d washed them and folded them, carefully paired the socks, excised the stain from a cherry pie she might have made.
She stirred on the sofa like a creature in the mud, a mutant, pink mud-puppy. Eyes still closed, she groped for her cigarettes. “Get me a coffee, willya.” He ignored her, started in on the dishes that she might have done, in that alternative world, but had not done in this actual one.
“Fuck you,” she mumbled, coughed.
Whatever his intention, it had not been this.
Months ago, back in April, he had been coming out of the Colonial Motel in Littleton. Things had gone well with Slim in the over-heated motel room with its fecal-hued decor; they’d shared a brief celebratory joint, the operation running very smoothly, the tight teamwork, the logging truck up to Favreau’s in Quebec. Slim was pleased. He had given Ben an ounce of coke and Ben’d demurred; he hardly ever did the stuff. But Slim pressed the baggie into his hand, “C’mon, man, I don’t have a box of chocolates.”
He’d been coming out of the motel. Two women smiled at him, waved little waves, their impression of normal. We’re just normal gals going to a normal motel room in the middle of a normal day. Their wrists were thin as twigs. Behind them, a tiny fellow scampered low like a fisher cat, pointy teeth, glinty-eyed.
The word was out, the junkie Twitter, Tweeker, Instagram. And they had been shifting in and out of the motel parking lot, tramping, shuffling, scuttling up and down. They looked like junkies. If you wanted to cast a movie with 20 junkies, this is as far as you’d have to go. Even the recently washed ones looked unkempt, hunched over their empty stomachs, and something about their eyes, restless and hinky. They smelled like dandruff, and compost, as if their constipation, the shit impacted for weeks in their colons, was off-gassing.
Ben had been coming out into the grubby April daylight, stubborn cold from the White Mountains slapping him across the face. The snow curdled on the verges, drawing back from the debris it had hidden all winter: beer cans, dog crap, syringes. He’d been heading for his truck, stepping off the curb, when a Pajero pulled to a stop. Right there, right in front of him. Junkie car, he knew instantly. The expired registration, the missing muffler—errands the owners just never got around to because they were too busy stealing morphine patches from cancer patients or ripping off the farm stands along Route 2.
The woman, the man got out. They didn’t have on coats. They were wearing sneakers. Her sweatpants were bright pink but dirty. Their faces were grey, like mushrooms in the cellar. Ben barely noticed them. Except he did. He gave the woman a second look.
Because she was looking at him, an energy passed between them, some kind of human code—and he would remember this with absolute clarity, like a particular color, even though it was happening at a micro level, below sound and light and even thought, down in the earth of the mind. She was telling him something, willing him to look, look. Her eyes catching his, shifting away, then back, then away, ahead, into the building. She stumbled at the curb, muttered some obscenity, clearly it was the curb’s fault.
He’d said to himself, Please don’t— She and the man were behind him now, Please don’t— He’d heard the motel’s front door open. Please don’t, he’d thought. Please don’t let there be a kid. But of course there was a kid; the woman had been trying to tell him. With what was left of her smacked-out brain, with some remnant of her mother’s love, she’d left him in the car, her child, her asset. She wasn’t selling him. Yet. She wasn’t that far down. Yet. The “yet” was out there, she could perhaps glimpse it in the distance like a dark tower, and therein the dark walls lay all the terrible things she was capable of.
She had dropped her gaze and walked past Ben. She had stumbled. She had cursed the curb. She and the man had gone into the motel to score. Ben glanced into the Pajero and saw the child. He was sitting in the middle of the back seat, no seatbelt, a hat and a jacket, filthy and too big. He was five, Ben reckoned, his eyes erased, gone like a war child, pin pricks.
Ben had been five miles along the I-93 when he’d realized he knew the woman. A long time ago. The foster home in Gilman, not a bad place. Shevaunne. Shevaunne, he’d never known her last name. Shevaunne had been her family’s mattress until finally a teacher at school noticed the scab on her lip wasn’t a cold sore but syphilis.
The boy, that boy. Ben felt himself gag. He could smell sour milk. Do not turn around. That boy, that child, broken doll.
The next exit was six miles ahead.
Do not turn around.
Do not turn around.
Do not fucking turn around do not open the door, the words all running together, overlapping, lapping, lapping so it was three or four voices all at once in his ears stereoscopic, do not do not open open the door the door do you hear me Benben you don’t mind Momma partying do you, Benben.
He’d smelled the sour milk, the sourness of three days, the curds and the whey.
He knew the boy knew the smell as he knew hunger’s metal coiling and he knew about the door you must never open, the turning around you must never do Benbenbenbenbenben.
He’d exhaled and inhaled, breath ragged as an asthmatic. He’d checked the mirrors, no cops. He’d swerved into the left lane, into a pull-out used by the plow trucks, and looped back toward Littleton.
I am turning around, he thought, I am turning the fuck around.
And it was just that, the car turning, going back the way he’d come, not the entire Universe upending, the planet tilting on a new axis. He was just one man, in a truck, turning around.
At the motel, he’d staked out the Pajero. After 30 minutes, Shevaunne—it was her, he was sure, even 20 years later, even with her brown teeth and ratty hair—and the man got back into the car; they were laughing, light of step having done a nip to take off the edge.
They’d stopped at McDonald’s on the way, food for the boy, celebratory milkshakes for the grown-ups, onto the highway, exiting for Concord; then, from Route 2, a side road, a dark wood, the house within it moldering, stained, the dirty snow banked up against the windows where no sun came and no sun was wanted. There was a broken plastic climbing gym half-buried in the snow. It looked so like the house from Ben’s own childhood, he was sure he could enter and turn left down a hallway, into the first bedroom and see his mattress on the floor with its Captain America sheets.
The junkies got out of the car. When the boy did not immediately comply, the man jerked open the door and yanked him out. The boy fell in the snow. The man shouted at him to get up. Ben waited for the kick—he was sure the kick would come. But Shevaunne stepped forward, took the boy’s arm, and led him to the house. They went in, the door shut, the lights did not go on.
For a week, Ben watched the house. Shevaunne and the man were too preoccupied to notice him parked on the road. They came, they went, sometimes with the boy, sometimes they left him alone in the house for hours and hours, a day, two days. Once or twice the boy came outside and wandered around the yard. He found a stick and started hitting trees and then the stick broke and he went back inside. At last, the man left by himself. Ben followed him until he saw him turn onto the interstate. Then he doubled back to the house.
For a while—a dozen minutes?—he waited, considering the outcomes. Because the moment was upon him. The best thing was for him to drive away, forget it, he had his small life. But he got out of the truck. He walked up the cracked asphalt drive. He walked forward, not backward. He had momentum.
“Hello?” he called, knocking on the door.
The door was open.
“Hey, hello?”
He could hear the low murmur of the TV. His mother had loved, loved Cops. “Like home videos, eh, Benben,” she’d say with a chuckle, tousling his hair. She’d watched the screen intently, imagining she might one day see someone she knew. From Ben’s perspective, she’d known them all, every loser, meth-head, crack-head, smack-head, face down, perp-walker, always wearing flip-flops and cargo shorts, tatts and tank tops. They were the same; they were interchangeable. Paulie, Rickie, Dickie, Bill, Jed, do not turn around do not turn around who do we have here?
“Shevaunne?” Ben’s voice intruded into the still house. No one moved much in here, the air stiff with the smell of microwave popcorn and unwashed hair and cheap coffee.
“Fuh? Wha?” He heard a garbled yelp from the back room.
“Shevaunne? I’m an old friend. Ben, Ben Comeau. I’m at the front door.”
She ambled out. From a distance, in the poor light, she looked pretty, she looked young, but when she came closer he could see how her mascara and eye-liner were smeared, seeping into the cracks around her narrow eyes. Her hair was limp, greasy.
“Wha? Who the fuck’r you?”
“Ben Comeau. The home in Gilman? Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, you remember?”
She tilted her head, which put her off balance and she staggered. “Ben?”
By now the boy had slipped along the hallway and hovered behind her. He was small, feral, and gave the impression of being difficult to catch.
“You had zits.” The memory focused her, an image she could grab on to. “They were seeping.” Her eyes were so narrow, he couldn’t see the color, he thought blue. “Whaddya wan, Ben?”
He glanced at the boy and she smiled a little smile as she reached out to touch her son, her hand on his head. “You a kiddie fiddler?”
A reasonable question—though, was she asking or offering?
“No.”
“Some church thing? You wanna pray or some shi?”
“I want you to come and live with me, you and the boy. I’ll take care of you.”
“I don think so.” Her voice was lazy and slow. She was in the easy hammock of her high.
“There’s a good school for him,” Ben gestured to the boy. “He’ll have regular food.”
“Get the fuh out,” she said.
But Ben would not. He had turned around. He was not all ruin. There was sunshine and fields of flowers. He had turned around, he had opened the door. This was why he had come. He knew she was watching him, trying to figure him out, if he was a freak or a weirdo and how much longer it might be until her boyfriend got back. He looked directly back at her, “And I have a steady supply for you, Shevaunne.”
She had shrugged her junkie shoulders. She had all the loyalty of a plastic bag on a windy day.